Migrants as pawns in Putin's hybrid warfare
By John J. Metzler
The setting is remote. The players are highly improbable. Yet, in the deep and forgotten forests along the Belorussian-Polish frontier, thousands of migrants from as far off as Syria, Iraq and even Afghanistan are amassing and milling about trying to enter Poland. Why? Because Poland forms the easternmost frontier of the European Union (EU), and thus becomes a path to freedom and prosperity in Germany or elsewhere in Europe.
An international standoff continues along this remote border on the verge of winter.
But the obvious question arises: how did all of these largely Middle Eastern migrants end up in the remote, landlocked country of Belarus? And why are they in Belarus, a glaring retro version of the former Soviet Union?
The roots of this current migrant crisis are real enough: people wishing to escape the endless conflict, chaos and sectarian violence in the Middle East. Why Belarus, when the path through Turkey has been one of the traditional paths into Europe?
Turkey largely provided this route during 2015. Migrant movements from Syria that were near biblical in scale witnessed more than a million people flee to Germany and Sweden. Now more than 3,000 people, mostly Kurds, are camped along the Belorussian-Polish frontier but are being blocked from entry into Poland (read, the EU) by Polish troops, police and barbed wire fences. Clashes between migrants and Polish police have flared.
The Belarus regime of Alexander Lukashenko remains at political loggerheads with the European Union over rigged elections and a spate of human rights violations. Intelligence sources claim that it's an open secret that Russia's Vladimir Putin has cajoled his protege, Lukashenko, into using the migrant flows to destabilize Poland and probably Lithuania, two EU and NATO countries bordering Belarus.
Thus Putin can pressure Europe through a witting proxy who is always looking for a fight.
Germany's interior minister, Horst Seehofer, accused Lukashenko of “using people's fates, with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to destabilize the West.”
Remote Belarus is hardly a transportation nexus until you realize that the migrants are flying from a number of countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Turkey to Belarus via scheduled and under-the-radar charter flights to the capital, Minsk.
The Belarus state airline Belavia maintains daily flights from Istanbul, while other carriers, such as Russia's Aeroflot, operate flights to Minsk.
Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that his country faces a “new kind of war,” for which the “ammunition is civilians.”
The European Union accused Belarus of mounting a “hybrid attack” by pushing migrants across the border into Poland, which “has reached a new alarming dimension. Groups of migrants are escorted by armed Belarusian security forces towards the borders of EU member states with the aim to force illegal entries.”
In Brussels, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell Fontelles stated unequivocally, “We stand in full solidarity with the member states affected by this hybrid attack and will continue assisting those most directly impacted,” in other words Poland and Lithuania.
Following urgent closed-door discussions in the United Nations Security Council, a special statement on the border crisis by Estonia, France, Ireland, Norway, the United States and the United Kingdom read, “We condemn the orchestrated instrumentalization of human beings whose lives and wellbeing have been put in danger for political purposes by Belarus, with the objective of destabilizing neighboring countries and the European Union's external border and diverting attention away from its own increasing human rights violations.”
The EU threatens more economic sanctions on Minsk. The dictator, Lukashenko, Putin's proxy from central casting, huffs, bluffs and pushes hapless people toward Poland's sovereign frontiers. Tragically, a number of these migrants have died during the brutally cold nights, being marooned in this no man's land on the doorstep of Europe.
Poland has every right to protect its international borders and state sovereignty, as does Baltic Lithuania. However, this situation does not say that the poor people caught in this limbo of no-man's land are the culprits. Hardly. But they are the unwitting pawns manipulated and guided by professional people traffickers who send them as hapless victims into uncharted territory.
Armed troops, high emotions and perhaps unseen provocations make this situation an accident waiting to happen. Moreover, could Vladimir Putin be manipulating the Belorussian crisis to draw attention away from Moscow's plans regarding Ukraine? Russia has amassed tanks and mechanized infantry on the Ukrainian border in a bid to intimidate the Kiev government, even as winter approaches.
Poland bears the brunt of the crisis now but downstream it shall likely be Germany, France and Britain, as Poland chooses not to become the victim again.
John J. Metzler (
jjmcolumn@earthlink.net
) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of “Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China.”